Fitness For Freedom Tips

Episode 305 : Does a Ketogenic Diet Help or Hurt Your Endurance?

Released: Sep 25, 2017

This isn’t a must read episode for The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance, it’s more of a review of a research article the book cited. That’s right there was a citation that I thought was questionable so I tracked down the original study and decided to critically analyze it to see if what the authors were saying was true and if this was a legitimate study that I could take seriously. The line in the book that got me questioning the citation was this, that when elite cyclist were not ketogenic adapted they were able to pedal a bike at over 900 kcal an hour for 147 minutes and when they were ketogenic adapted they were able to ride on average for 151 minutes and that this was not statistically significant, to which I said neh, neh that is a 4 minute difference which I know doesn't sound like a lot but if these elite cyclists were in a race that would mean if the keto group were in first then the rest would be somewhere between 1.5 and 2km behind them which in the elite cycling world is a huge difference, so different the T.V crews wouldn’t even be following the non keto adapted group, so I wanted to dive in and see what this study was all about.